More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
Why e-books? Why not web novels/browser-based books?
August 8, 2006 | 8:43 am
|
By Robert Nagle
I’m preparing a little talk at BarCamp Texas about e-books and their impact on publishing. I’m going to talk about workflows, commercial possibilities and marketing strategies.
However, the question always arises: why e-books? Why not RSS Readers or Avantgo or surfing content via wifi? This is an obvious question, and I’ve heard answers on teleread and other places, but I’d like to hear what people think at this point of time. What distinguishes the ebook experience from (let’s say) the PDA web surfing experience?
Here are some rough notes I’m compiling. Feel free to add your thoughts (and relevant links).
Ebook Advantages
Offline Reading. Is this really an issue? My city of Houston is planning an ambitious plan to extend municipal wi-fi to most of the city. It’s conceivable that I’ll never be stranded again.
But e-books reduce performance and network congestion issues. And there will always be places with lots of interference or no telephone polls. No one likes to think that sites get hacked or URL’s go dead or websites become slashdotted or websites stop paying their webhosting bills or get sued. Maybe a page you’re downloading has 600 comments attached to it as a result of a security hole in the web application. Does the reader really want to download all that?
These things happen, and it reminds us that relying on net access to obtain content creates a series of external dependencies beyond a reader’s control.
Easier Asset Management. Even if you could slurp up a website’s content, chances are there’s multiple web pages and various graphics (which may not be optimized for portable reading devices). An e-book is one binary file. That’s it.
Better Battery Life . My ebookwise lasted for a good 10 hours, and recharged in no time at all. I’ve been told that the Sony Reader and other e-ink devices can also run for comparable periods. Laptops require almost constant recharging and can become quite warm on the lap. Unlike laptops, single purpose devices like ebook readers don’t require powerful processing power or energy, making them more practical for everyday use and longer reading periods.
Better Indices and Table of Contents. Books and e-books start with an organized sitemap (to use webspeak) which serves as a starting point for navigation. This is where e-books differ from p-books. In many p-books you start at the TOC and never return to it again. Browser/Avantgo/RSS Readers are mainly organized by chronology, which often obscures valuable posts from the reader. Providing site organization is beyond an RSS reader’s intended purpose. However, blogs can incorporate some basic TOC structure on the main page. Just not easily. (For an example, see how to do it on blogger.com ). How do you search a website? Often you use the site’s search engine (which inevitably is run by google and may include sections of the website not relevant to you).
Digital Rights Management (DRM)/Security. Ok, let’s forget for a moment the dangers/irritations of DRM. This is one feature you’re probably not going to encounter on slurped webpages or RSS feeds (not yet anyway). If implemented well and fairly, the prospect of actually making money could trigger more people to create content for it. An ebook is something you expect to pay for. A web novel is something you expect for free.
Easier Conversions with Source Material. Ok, a plucker e-book you created by hand may work for your current generation of readers. But what happens in 10 years when the reader software is no longer supported? Converting from one binary file to another is not a trivial task. But if the content owner/publisher has everything in TEI-Lite or Docbook source(for example), it’s much easier to convert to later binary formats that emerge. Normally the user doesn’t touch this source material. However, keeping content in a “raw” format reduces the necessity of having to “reheat” content that has already been “cooked.”
Ebooks keep you focused (or trapped). There I said it. When we surf blogs, we frequently follow links without ever returning to the original page. That’s the nature of websurfing. But an e-book brings focus to the reading experience. You read this, and then you read that. You are not distracted by hundreds of links which may be interesting (though not crucial to the overall reading experience). Samuel Johnson wrote that “Nothing concentrates the mind of a man more than the knowledge he will be executed in the morning.” Or an e-book without the usual pointless distractions.
(Focus is important for certain kinds of content: fiction, poetry, tutorials, study guides, self-improvement, history, spirituality/philosophy and to some extent social sciences).
The possibility of a uniform reading/multimedia experience. Macromedia recognized early on that, despite its proprietary nature, the flash player allowed content creators to create for a single platform. With websurfing, you deal with different browsers, different resolutions, different character encoding. On e-book software, you have a greater deal of certainty that if something works on Adobe Acrobat (for example), it’s going to work regardless of OS or hardware. (Support for advanced multimedia features is another story). The cumbersome thing about websurfing is dealing with security problems/plug-ins/bad design and features which don’t work in portable devices.
Vertical orientation rather than horizontal orientation. This is a more familiar experience to readers and prevents too much side-to-side head motion.
Advantages of the Browser/feed reader
A familiar interface. Browser Behavior is similar across platforms. On the other hand, many features are just not relevant to portable devices. Stylesheets for many websites were not designed with portable readers in mind.
No special tools needed. Because weblogs are built upon RSS, almost anything can be sucked into the user’s PDA. There is no need for special conversion/file generation tools for reading. (This comes at the expense of performance).
Seamless integration of content with other web content. If your content references something on the WWW, gosh darn it, someone can get there with a click of a button. And that’s good.
Access to HTML source. Browsers let users download the HTML and images. This could be useful for users wanting to create derivative works or trying to copy/imitate a certain effect.
(Possibly) better/more metadata. HTML source often contain information about licensing, DC metadata and the source of the webpage.
Ability to print/Copy/Paste What kinds of excerpts would a person normally like to copy or paste? Recipes, instructional manuals, code samples, diagrams. With normal books, you could always make xeroxes if necessary to share with friends. How do you deal with fair use in ebook readers? Because of DRM, this feature will be difficult to implement in ebooks securely and easily. At least with reading in the browser (either as an HTML page or a flash viewer), you always have the option to do a Print Screen. This problem could be solved by allowing users of a Sony Reader limiting ability to print from viewer software on their PC. On the other hand, considering the power of today’s OCRs, there’s always going to be the issue of allowing print capability while crippling clipboard/screenshot grabbing for OCR.
Excellent editors/creation tools. By now users are familiar with web forms and clipboards and hyperlinks. Many blogging tools make writing just a matter of writing stuff and pressing the Submit button. Once the template is made, the user rarely needs to mess with code or do special things to individual pages. (Here’s a list of some desktop blog editors by Larry Hendrick). E=book creation tools are still a little geeky and require a knowledge of styles, whether they be in Open Office or Docbook/CSS. It’s quite possible that web forms may provide clean and more ontologically descriptive output code than a lone desktop app or a company CMS (often at a fraction of the price).
Access to comments. Aside from dotreader , web surfing (but not RSS readers) let you view comments. Actually, that may not always be a good thing given the huge amount of spam out there today. Downloading 5 comments is fine; downloading 1000+ is not. I suspect dotreader gives granular control over the visibility of annotations.
Version Control/Access to “Latest Version.” Actually because ebooks are only a single file, it is easier to manage versions (both from the standpoint of author as well as reader). On the other hand, you have no guarantee that ebook you are reading is in fact the canonical version. People can and do revise webpages continuously. (In fact, I am typing this paragraph a full week after I first posted the article!) If you are connecting to a network to read a page or website, you don’t have to worry about finding the latest version; you can feel reasonably certain the version you are reading is the latest and greatest. For writers, that means you can release content more quickly (knowing full well that you may be making substantial revisions over time). Web novels are constantly evolving, while ebook editions become fossilized the moment they are available.
So what else distinguishes the two types of reading experiences? Which differences are likely to become more significant over time?
Robert Nagle (aka idiotprogrammer) writes fiction under various pseudonyms. He lives in Houston.
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
Great article. Although I do like the interface and local content of ebooks vs online reading, I look at it from a slightly different angle… the content.
Sort of like magazines versus books. You get the “real stuff” in books. Magazine articles are bite sized treats, and useful for getting familiar with what’s currently being said about a topic or for the current news. Now we have RSS feeds and web sites to get all the latest scoop on things. But unless you are trying to always keep up on the latest (for fun or, say, to write about tech news), it’s probably not the best way to spend lots of your time. Better maybe to pick your favorite sources, and focus on them, plus some others with lower volume but good content/quantity ratios.
Generally, the RSS news is fun info, but most of it isn’t really all that important 5 years from now. Books, however, are generally more like “real meat” than a “sugar fix.” Whether fiction for fun, or non-fiction for learning and personal growth, books just stick with me in a different way. Even if I skim them to get through them quickly. Magazines are more like fast food and less nourishing.
I don’t know if that makes any sense to anyone as it’s kind of hard to describe. I wonder if anyone else can related to what I’m trying to say?!
You mention better TOC, so accessing the content in a discrete fashion, I would point to the opposite – continuous navigation throught the whole file:
Say, I finished reading more or less at 2/3 of a pdf => scroll-bar to ca. 2/3, have I been here already? No – move a a little back, Yes – a little forward.
Normally, you would automatically mix both TOC and “messy navigation” to quickly get where you want. Web content lacks this flexibility.
Hi,
There is no way web surfing/rss feeds/browsers will replace fiction books. E-books are just a manifestation of books and while they have several differences with the p-books (so I agree we should not try to imitate the p-book experience exactly but take advantage of the e possibilities), they are still books. So they still require some concentration, some privacy/isolation, fixed content (not all of us are storytellers) and so on.
For nonfiction and manuals and more generally books that are intrinsically split in chunks (fiction short stories too), there may be a case for browsers/feed readers but we are still far away from the technical capability to make it feasible on the publishing scale of today.
Liviu
Firstly, in pure technology terms, I’d say that a novel or a textbook provided in HTML and read with a browser is still an ebook. Even if it has internal/external links and no DRM etc, it’s still an ebook. I suspect the question you want to ask is “why ebook readers, not browsers/feed readers?”
To go a little deeper (and away from presentation technology and toward content), if the “book” part of ebook implies something that has been published in the traditional sense (i.e. it’s gone through a selection process and then been edited/designed to professional standards) then there’s your fundamental difference from a blog or web feed.
HUW: To put it another way: in ebooks, content is carefully selected, edited and –heavens!–even proofread. With an ebook, you know that somebody has probably gone out of his/her way to streamline it for readability and made sure it’s full of meat. With RSS/web surfing, you don’t have that high degree of confidence. I wonder though whether web software (blog, wikis) can perform this same kind of winnowing/pruning/polishing function too. Instead of just posting something “when you feel like it,” a blog/book can consist of a select number of posts in polished form.
Bob: I think I understand what you’re getting after. Better to follow 5 RSS feeds than 300. Interestingly, I configured a new bloglines account, imported my OPML file of my 300 feeds to the new account and started deleting as many feeds as I could. I found it impossible to limit myself to under 100. Scary realization. I intentionally tried to limit my feeds to those offering a lot of meaty content, but I still couldn’t crack 100.
Mikolaj: Although I’m glad “messy navigation with scrollbars” exist, I wonder why we would actually use it. It’s more helpful for previewing the book than actually going through it.
Liviu: I couldn’t decide whether casual/occasional reading (such as reference works) would work better as ebooks or as web-accessible content.
I really like your article and would like to add two more points.
Pro-Ebook:
Editability. I can underline, highlight, boookmark, add a comment or a drawing, etc. This may not sound interesting for fiction, but very interesting for non-fiction. I work in higher education and I see a real potential there (I just wish others saw it, too!).
Pro-Offline Reading:
Independance. As long as I have an SD card, I have a library in my hand. I can read on planes, at the beach, when waiting in line, and in many more places where I doubt I would find an Internet connection. Even when I am in the States I need to look for a Panera to go online when on the go. Otherwise, I would have to pay (like at Starbucks), so here is one more point: I would pay double if the content I would like to read was not free – once for the content, and, additionally, every single time I would like to access it on the go.
Robert: Well, I usually do so with paper books – I naively trust that I remember where I finished, and then have to browse to the actual place. I wasn’t thinking of the scrollbar navigation as a distinct means, but rather that with the whole book being scrollable & indexed, one could always resort to either method, provided that your viewer supports them. Your options when browsing 100 sites depend on the choices made by 100 content providers. As an extreme – remember everybody got annoyed by the flash-laden sites in pre-broadband times? In a sense, it’s a single standard vs. dozens of individual whims.
Robert, I think you’re setting up a false dichotomy. The choice isn’t between “ebooks” and blogs/RSS feeds, it’s between ebooks in the never-actually-succeeded 1998 model of ebooks epitomized by the DEC SRC Lectrice — the GemStar/SoftBook/Nuvomedia/Mobipocket/MS Reader/eReader model — and ebooks in the wildly successful download-as-PDF-and-print, or use-as-a-Web-site models. Ebooks on the Web aren’t blogs; examples of successful ebooks include Wikipedia, the New York Times (a new ebook every day), PubMed, the collection of documents in the ACM Digital Library, etc. Edited, published, curated content. It should surprise no one to see that (successful) ebooks are in fact different from pbooks.
See my post to the ebook-community list about this (which has generated a remarkably small follow-up trail — perhaps because the “alternative future” meme is so deeply embedded in the readers of that list). See the On-Line Books Page for a listing of additional on-line books.
[...] Teleread, a blog advocating ebooks and open DRM has an interesting article in prepation for Barcamp Texas. Worth reading. Here [...]
Bill: most of the people I know have no idea of what I mean when I say “ebook.” For them it simply means, “something you read on your laptop” (usually a PDF). And in that case, there really is no difference in the reading experience (in terms of design and hardware). Perhaps the differences will become apparent as we have more devices and reading systems. Even though the differences between ebooks and RSS feeds don’t seem significantly different, in fact their workflows and authoring tools are radically different. That to me is why the question is important.
Yes, that’s what I’m driving at. And their notion of an ebook is a valid one. The most successful and widely read ebooks in existence are structured as either Web sites or PDF files.
But there is one difference, I think — the successful web-page/PDF ebooks are largely DRM-free.
Personally, I doubt it. I think the “download a file and read it offline” model of ebooks has had its day (short as it may have been). My hypothesis is that normal computers (laptops and otherwise) and cellphones are the devices that people will buy and carry, and any e-reading that is going to be done will be done primarily on those. The PDA and the hardware book-reader are gadget ideas that failed in the marketplace, and it’s difficult to see what could ever revive them. And what’s more, the laptop and cellphone that people read on will be continuously connected (no more “offline”).
Sure, there are some possible odd places where you might see e-reading hardware. A college or other educational institution might require them for textbooks; they might succeed in China, as others have posited. But long-term, it’s hard to see how they can compete.
By the way, why do you continue to talk about RSS? RSS is a simple mechanism to transform pull-notification of web-site changes into pseudo-push notification. To compare it to ebooks is to compare apples and oranges.
Quick observation: An IDPF survey showed that most customes of Fictionwise, etc., preferred PDAs. I love mine (plural). It would be fun to interesting to see what happened if PDAs were used without all the present complexities resulting from the Tower of eBabel, the harsh DRM and the joys of ActiveSync-style procedures–or, in the Gutenberg world, the complexities of format converesation (certainly Plucker approch is progress in that regard!). I won’t give up on the form factor yet. Anyway, a great discussion. And by the way, Bill, I’d agree with you on RSS and e-books. Two different creatures. The Wikipedia, on the other hand, is indeed an e-book—a networked version of the venerable Britannica. – David
Well, yes, RSS is a different beast, but interestingly, podiobooks.com creates custom RSS feeds for serial fiction podcasts (and in fact the sequential dripping out of content is intrinsic to the listening experience). The feed begins when you subscribe, lasts for a certain number of episodes, and feeds you these episodes from the point you start subscribing. The same thing could easily be done in text-based content to create an artificial sense of suspense.
I may be an exception, but I read mainly fiction and poetry only in bed (or perhaps a very comfy chair). I almost never read web fiction on my monitor unless I have converted it to some kind of ebook first. Tthis may have to do with the horizontal orientation of the Opera browser on the Nokia 770 compared to the vertical orientation of the fbreader reading software. Also, because most of the sites I read are not designed for mobile devices, they are often difficult to read in a web browser.
Call me a techno-optimist, but I think the next generation of ebook readers will transform the world! Yes, $350 is still too high for essentially a reading device, but I would gladly pay a pretty penny if it accomplishes half of what it claims to do. I’ve taught literature at universities before; now and especially when the Sony Reader comes out, it will be a no brainer for scholars in history and literature departments to buy these things in addition to laptops.
Robert Nagle provides a valuable discussion of some of the distinctions between offline and online reading. Recently, I have been collecting examples to illustrate the desirability of rapid and easy access to the web while reading. My understanding and enjoyment of many texts was increased because I was able to select a word or phrase from an ebook and feed it into a search engine with effortless alacrity during my recreational reading. Below are four examples:
An excerpt from “The Crystal World” by J. G. Ballard:
The light at Port Matarre is always like this, very heavy and penumbral — do you know Böcklin’s painting, ‘Island of the Dead,’ where the cypresses stand guard above a cliff pierced by a hypogeum, while a storm hovers over the sea?
I was able to rapidly find an electronic representation of the painting “Island of the Dead” online and this helped me to understand Ballard’s mood building citation. I was also able to look up the word “hypogeum” which was not part of my vocabulary.
An excerpt from “Pickman’s Model” by H. P. Lovecraft:
That’s because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear – the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I don’t have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh.
Online I was able to determine the images that caused Howard Phillips Lovecraft to shiver by finding two variants of Fuseli’s most famous painting subject entitled “Nightmare”. Wikipedia has a relevant article, and it is fun to know what frightens the frightener.
An excerpt from “Ubik” by P. K. Dick:
He noticed then that subtle background music hung over the lounge. It had been there all this time. The same as on the chopper. “Dies irae, dies illa,” the voices sang darkly. “Solvet saeclum in favilla, teste David cum Sybilla.” The Verdi Requiem, he realized.
I was able to read about The Verdi Requiem and to find a translation of the lyrics that P. K. Dick does not provide. The lyrics were valuable in deciphering Dick’s novel I believe. An mp3 of the requiem also helped me to hear what Dick was probably hearing in his mind during the composition of his novel.
An excerpt containing the initial sentences of “Tau Zero” by Poul Anderson:
“Look – there – rising over the Hand of God. Is it?”
“Yes, I think so. Our ship.”
They were the last to go as Millesgården was closed.
This beginning book passage was confusing. Online I determined that Millesgården is a museum with a collection of statuary by Carl Milles. “Hand of God” is one of the celebrated sculptures that he created and it has several variants. Seeing an image of the sculpture as it appears in Millesgården was wonderful and it helped to clarify that the phrase “our ship” refers to a spaceship.
Perhaps these examples and others from your experience can help to show that ebook hardware with internet connections and web browsers can help intensify the reading experience.
Robert: Thanks for elaborating re the RSS. To me, it makes more sense when a book or podcast series is being produced and there’s no other choice. I’d rather get the material on my own terms. Then again, others may see things different. Best of oblige all kinds of users.
Garson: I, too, like to check out relevant sites at times when I’m reading. One problem is that sites come and go. Ideally books themselves can have stable links, as well as deep linking, so you can find specifics in one book while reading another. (Oh no! I’ve offended John Updike.)
Thanks,
David
There are a few people who are attempting their own web-novels and a number of browser based books.
I’ve just started a project myself.
Time will tell how sucessful these endeavors prove to be.
Although he does bring up a good point. I will need to look into releasing e-Books when the story gets large enough.